Artist investigated over spyware in NYC Apple stores
updated 07:45 pm EDT, Thu July 7, 2011
Secret Service investigating after store complains
A New York area artist found himself the subject of a Secret Service search warrant and confiscation after surreptitiously installing a program on NYC Apple Store computers that took pictures of users every minute and uploaded them to his server, Mashable reports. Apple contacted authorities after the artist, 25-year-old Kyle McDonald, staged an unauthorized "exhibition" of the photos at two Apple stores.
For his part, McDonald wanted simply to capture people's expressions as they used computers, hoping to provoke some thought about the relationship of people and the machines many of them now spend most of their time with. McDonald began by asking for and receiving permission from store security to take pictures within the store, including asking some customers permission to photograph them with a regular camera.
What he didn't get permission for, however, was the second stage of his experiment: installing programs on display computers that took pictures of the people using them and uploaded the results to McDonald's private server. As the Apple Stores wipe their computers every night, McDonald would have to re-install the programs each day. He eventually posted some of the results of the captures on a Tumblr blog, and earlier this month set up "an exhibition" of the pictures at the Soho and West 14th Street Apple Stores, again without permission.
Over the course of his "project," MacDonald set up roughly 100 machines to call his servers over three days, taking over 1,000 photos. It wasn't long before a Cupertino technician had figured out what was going on and traced the traffic from the store (which Apple monitors) back to McDonald's servers, using McDonald's own program. Shortly thereafter, four Secret Service agents (who handle cases of electronic fraud and wiretapping) appeared at his door and confiscated his computers, an iPod and two flash drives. They told the artist that Apple would contact him separately.
McDonald argues that he believes he has not actually broken any laws, and that the idea had a benign and genuinely artistic intent: to study the expression on the faces of people engrossed in computer use, who are generally not interacting with any humans around them. McDonald said he has not posted the source code for his program as he generally does with other projects, realizing that it could be misused, and will remove any photos in the project that the subjects ask to have removed.
While customers at an Apple Store -- surrounded by computers that are capable of taking pictures -- may not have a reasonable expectation of full privacy, authorities may have a different view of the activity of taking candid photos that the users could not have known about. To date, however, McDonald has not yet been charged and Apple has not yet contacted the young artist. McDonald hopes he will be allowed to return to the Apple Stores in New York City -- to buy replacements for the computers that were confiscated. [via Mashable]
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